Last night I spent some time working on a few updates to my build. The main thing I wanted to do was replace the front 200mm Corsair fan would a pair of 120mm Noctua NF-P12 fans. When I was in there working I wanted to do a few other things as well such as the usual tiding up the cables a bit more, putting in my new Samsung 840 drive, and just getting in there again for a bit of fun and seeing how it went from there.
I started with these cheap UV fans just for test fitting. I actually like the look of these quite a bit, but as you can see they are actually cracked and they got that way after only a few hours of use
I do plan to use these in my "Sunbeam acrylic cube classic build' that I am planning on doing soon.
These are also some of the loudest fans I've ever heard, I learned when I had them connected to the fan controller that they spin at a maximum of over 2,000 RPM, but they sound much much louder than that, probably due to poor design.
IMG_2099 by
Andre Vautour, on Flickr
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Here is what the front mesh area looked like with the Corsair black 200mm. I also considerd cutting out the mesh area and using the 200mm fan again, but I prefer Noctua fans so I decided to go this way instead.
IMG_2102 by
Andre Vautour, on Flickr
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Andre Vautour, on Flickr
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Initially I had the bottom fan fitted a bit higher, but the way the mesh is designed the two fans were not lined up, so I ended up moving the bottom one up a bit, then moved the top one up a bit so i could fit it in holes that lined up with the ones the bottom fan were scred into.
IMG_2111 by
Andre Vautour, on Flickr
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Another thing I wanted to achieve with the new fan setup was an even air pressure inside the case that I could adjust to be positive or negative using the fan controller. Instead of having 1X 200mm corsair intake and 3X 120mm Noctua fans exhaust , the new layout will be 2X 1200mm Noctua intake at the front and 2X 120mm Noctua exhaust in the roof. I moved the 120mm notuca in the rear to the front and the cooler will just passively blow air out the rear mesh for now.
IMG_2117 by
Andre Vautour, on Flickr
NF-P12's have been my favorite fans for a long time now.
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Andre Vautour, on Flickr
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Here is what it looks like with the Noctua's fitted in the front area. I know that there is a portion of the bottom fan that isn't getting any mesh for airflow, but I'm not too worried about that for now. Also, I know the fans are not screwed in at the top/bottom, but they are very secure and do not vibrate at all, so I am not worried about this very much either.
I know another option for better airflow and extra security in the mounts would be to dill some new holes at the top and bottom and scre that in, as well as drilling some new holes in the bottom half were the bottom fan is, or even cutting out the entire area because that mesh design still does create some turbulence noise with the Noctua fans as well.
IMG_2124 by
Andre Vautour, on Flickr
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Andre Vautour, on Flickr
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So there is what 2X Noctua NF-P12's look like in the front. I also have 2X P12's in the roof.
It is interesting how the hex mesh design used in the roof does not look THAT much more open than the circle mesh design used in the front, but still the mesh in the front creates lots of resistance noise but the roof mesh hardly makes any noise at all.
Now I moved on to some other stuff.
The font panel is pretty good quality, as good as can be expected for the price range. I don't really like the asymmetry of the power/hdd led area next to the front i/o area and the extremely stiff cheap feel of the power button.
I also wish that they would either have 2 120mm fan mounts at the front like many other cases, or at least have a single 200mm mount OR space for optional 120mms like they do in the roof. The extra flexibility would be nice.
The little flap that you open to acess the front I/O stuff does have a fairly nice feel to it when it opens, even if it is plastic and its held on with small plastic fingers that look like they are easy to break. No issues so far though.
Another thing is that the front dust filter for the fans uses 2 of the same small latches that you release by pressing on them. That works nicely when you press it when you want to remove the filter, but the problem with it though is that it comes off and falls on the ground easily if you are lifting it to move the case or even just doing any soft of thing around the case it is very easy to press by accident and case the dust filter to fall off.
One of the things I added last time I was inside the case was one of my double sided tape mounting points on the inside of the front wall midway up. I didn't really need it at the time because the only thing being held with it was the vey thing single cable from the 200mm front fan, but that I have 2 of the oversized sleeved noctua extensions to run, so it came in handy now.
My USB3 header should be coming soon, when it doesn I will be hooking up one of the usb3's at the front, but until then I rolled it up and stored it in the optical bay area.
Im still not totally pleased with te cables around the optical bay area, but I have been working on it a bit the last few times I've been in the case and it's getting better each time.
The mount of cables that come hanging inside the 650D when it's new is really shocking. I completely cut out the firewire cable as I know I will never use that. The rest of the stuff I didn't use like the front panel audio, the cables for the build in fan controller, FC6 fan controller stuff and more is all zipped up to the roof using a few of those cable mounting points I put up on the roof. There definitely is quite a lot of stuff up there, but you never see it when the case is all put together.
I had some extra cables in there temporarily for cloning my SSD in, I will talk about that later in the post.
One thing I have noticed is that the rubber grommets collect dust very quicky and then have have a dusty dirty look to them, but it really is not easy to clean them they always are more gray and hazy then when they are new. I guess that is just a side effect of them being very sticky and good quality rubber, which they are.
I know I've talked about the USB3 pass through already but I really am annoyed they did not make a proper 19 pin header connected to the case or at least offer a replacement front panel area and I would definitely buy one.
The next thing I was planning to do when the case was open was put in the new SSD and get it OS cloned onto it.
Here is a look at the old M4 128, which is now in my sister's computer
A nice looking drive for sure it has some nice silver metallic finish to it
Not I know it looks quite bad when you look at the cables that are up on the roof of the optical bay area, but as I said you never really can see that. Here is what the area you can see looks like when you look at the top from the side. I am very pleased with this because it was more messy around here before and I was able to clean it up a lot.
DSCN1721 by
Andre Vautour, on Flickr
A look at the interior of the case when it was on it's side
I removed the fan cable extention that was running along here to the rear fan so now it's a bit tidier along the top of the back panel
Here's the cables along the front
These are pretty crappy pictures of the Samsung drive because I had to switch camera and I was using the flash but there are lots of pictures of the Samsung when it was just coming out of the box just go back a page or two and you will see those.
Installing the Samsung
You can see it's very low profile in all back you barely even notice it really. It's also much thinner than the crucial M4, not that that really matter for a desktop but it feels different to handle it though.
I have the lamptron back on white, now each of the fans are a noctua and I am pleased with that. 1 and 2 are the fronts and 3 and 4 are the top
Rear panel cables:
Another thing I would like to mention quickly because it worked so well is the Samsung Data Migration software.
All I did was put the Samsung drive into the place the M4 was then hook up some temp cables for the M4, you run the software and it just copies everything over, which is not a surprise but what was a very pleasant surprise was how fast it went. It went about 180MB/s which is the write speed limitation of the M4 drive, but it only took 7 minutes to copy all the data from the M4 to the Samsung drive, then I shut down, removed the M4 and booted back up and it booted windows from the Samsung drive.
So the entire cloning process took under 8 minutes, which I thought was very impressive and it could not have been easier.
Samsung Data Migration 3 by
Andre Vautour, on Flickr
Samsung Data Migration 1 by
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Here are the videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8smePNPo9DQ&feature=plcp
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aK-T_Sp52ss&feature=plcp
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmO7qB6loyQ&feature=plcp